This invention relates to strategically strengthened steel automotive members of open elongated structure, and is particularly suitable for strategically strengthened, open structure, automobile components, such as impact door beams used for crash energy management.
Automotive vehicles employ crash energy management impact beams for protection of passengers. A good share of these beams are of closed structure type, e.g., cylindrical or tubular, as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,370,437; 5,123,694; 5,118,159; and 4,708,390. Such tubular beams are normally of generally uniform wall thickness. Further, they do not have exposed edges because of their closed or tubular configuration. Therefore, they can be readily induction heat treated. These tubes can be formed of lower hardness steel and then heat treated. Heat treatment of such tubular impact beams can be achieved by induction simply by encircling successive portions of the beam with a heat treatment induction coil to heat the same, followed by quenching. Door beam tubes are sometimes made of special steel, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,210,467, and then cut to length and provided with a desired end configuration.
As an alternative to this type of tubular impact beam structure, it is known to take flat steel, and form it into an open beam by cold stamping or rolling. There is a limit, however, to the hardness and strength of this type of final beam product, because the metal must not be so hard as to not be reliably formable by stamping or rolling. As another alternative, steel may be hot formed into the desired configuration, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,972,134. However, this latter alternative is costly both in the per piece cost and the capital investment required.
Prior efforts to form open section type impact beams from low strength steel, and then heat treat the beam, have resulted in at least two imperfections which are not acceptable. First, if standard induction heating with encircling coils is used, the free or exposed edges of the beam tend to become overheated and burned, while the remainder of the cross section remains insufficiently heated. Second, the impact beam tends to become distorted as a result of the heating and subsequent quenching. Hence, such impact beams do not meet the required quality standards for easy and effective assembly in an automobile, or other vehicle. Furthermore, they do not have the required uniform strength characteristics that are required in many applications due to the uneven heating.
It would therefore be desirable to fabricate automobile components such as impact beams of open structure type from unhardened steel, and subsequently harden selected portions of the steel without the imperfections and drawbacks previously experienced in the prior art. Such an open structure impact beam would preferably have elongated side flanges along its length for added strength, but without the burned flange edges and/or excessively distorted beam structure experienced in the prior art, and with greater and more uniform strength.